Black Diamond Page 23

  ‘And I know yours. I think I’ll stay. Got some videos we can watch?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Try and make me go.’

  ‘That’s easy. I pick up the phone and say you arrived just after your father asked about you.’

  ‘He isn’t my father,’ the boy screamed. He raised the knife he was holding, until it pointed towards her at a definitely deliberate, offensive angle. Luckily it was one of the kitchen table knives – not a carving knife, but the sharper ones weren’t far away. ‘You’d better not,’ he shouted at her.

  For some reason she wasn’t afraid. She didn’t believe he could hurt her with a blunt knife. And she was bigger than he was. She stepped up and took the knife away from him. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she said.

  The situation was too much for her. He was too much. Suddenly she just didn’t want him in the house. ‘He seemed,’ she said, ‘like a nice man.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Women like him.’

  They liked him because he made a good impression, even if you didn’t count the looks, which made a big difference to begin with. The son made a bad impression, although he’d figured out how to overcome other people’s reluctance; he’d kept her talking for hours, persuaded her to invite him to a meal, made her feel guilty about him.

  ‘I like him too,’ she said. ‘But if you really don’t want to go back to him, I won’t call him up. I’ll phone the police instead.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then, your mother.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘You choose,’ she told him. ‘It’s up to you.’ Three impossible choices – that was freedom. Her own childhood had been like that. She’d never understood why children had to be subjected to that kind of cheating. Now she knew – it was simple; because otherwise, you couldn’t get them to do what you wanted them to.

  She took out the calling card and went to the phone. She dialed the number.

  He didn’t move. The phone rang and rang.

  She thought that she might have to hang up: the father hadn’t had time to get home yet, or he’d gone out again.

  There was a click. A man’s voice said, ‘Hello.’ The voice was a little different, but Sandra recognized it. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘It’s Sandra Beale from Number 23, Wheaten Road. You were asking about your son.’

  ‘Is he there?’

  ‘Yes, but he doesn’t want –’

  ‘I’ll be right over,’ he said, and hung up. She put the receiver down.

  From the kitchen doorway Eric said, ‘That’s not fair. I told you not to.’

  ‘That’s what you told me,’ she said, ‘but sometimes people say things they don’t really mean, because it’s a way of playing for time. You know that you’ve got to settle things with him. He’s the one you live with. If you really don’t want to stay with him, there’s your mother.’

  ‘I don’t want to live with anybody. I want to live all alone. Like you.’

  ‘Well, that’s no problem. You’ll just have to wait. Till you’re grown up. Then you can do it. Do what you like.’

  ‘It’s too far away,’ he said miserably.

  His father, the real Roy, was at the house in a few minutes. His face was serious. The boy couldn’t look at him.

  ‘Come on,’ he said.

  Eric shuffled forward. Roy put an arm around him. ‘That’s right,’ he said. He moved a step back and opened the door. Over Eric’s head he said, ‘Thank you,’ to her, and left. She nodded. She’d done the right thing, but she’d betrayed someone in order to do it; someone who was weaker than she was.

  She closed the door after them. She stood there a long while before locking up and putting the chain on.

  *

  She went back to the kitchen and sat down at the table. The evidence of Eric’s hunger was everywhere in front of her: jars, open boxes, bottles. She stood up again to put the mayonnaise into the icebox. She was beginning to feel bad.

  She cleared up the table, put things back where they were supposed to be, washed the dishes and got out the dustpan and brush. She felt a little better. What was either of them to do with her? They were strangers.

  She took a long time cleaning up in the kitchen. To keep herself company, and to stop herself thinking about Eric and Roy, she turned on the radio. She worked until everything was spotless but she was almost ready to start the job all over again. It wasn’t so much that her aunt’s high standards of housekeeping urged her towards imitation; rather, that she was in the sort of mood that was drawing her deeper into itself.

  She cleaned the sink, the counters and tabletop, the floor. Then she made sure that the back door was locked, looked at the windows to see that the catches were on, and turned out some of the lights. She hadn’t thought about Bert for hours. It was time to give serious attention to the subject. She’d planned to use some of her time over the weekend doing just that. Right, she thought: Bert. What am I going to do about it? Nothing came to her. She didn’t have anything in common with him, he took her for granted, she’d never believed that he loved her; and as a matter of fact, she didn’t like him enough, either. The hell with him.

  She made herself a cup of coffee and took it around the corner into the alcove between the hall and the dining room, where the television set was. Aunt Marion maintained that she looked at the news and nothing else, but Sandra suspected that she watched a couple of quiz shows too, every once in a while. A capacious, stiff-backed armchair was positioned in front of the set. A small table stood to the right of the chair, a footstool in front. In the seat, and against the back, several cushions had been bunched into a second, inner shape. Sandra pulled the chair back a few feet, pushed the pillows around and tried them out in different ways.

  She looked at a documentary about an Indian landowner who had made his family property into a nature reserve. Among his many schemes for maintaining the natural balance of plants and animals was one that would restore the original wildlife to the numbers on record before drought, famine, flood and – worst of all – hunters had disrupted the populations. Tigers had died out of the area, but one of the workers in the reserve had brought him a female leopard cub. The film was about how he trained the leopard to go back to the wild.

  She watched to the end of the program and then for a little while longer, through the start of a comedy, until she began to yawn. She turned off the machine, checked the doors and windows once again, looked around the kitchen and went upstairs.

  She took her book with her. Aunt Marion read a lot, mostly biographies and history books; if she had a few minutes of extra time, she’d pick up her embroidery or her knitting. She was a real person, full of information and practical experience: someone you could take seriously. When she died, she would leave behind many useful things that she’d made herself and given to other people. Her character too was generous. She sometimes dispensed advice, although usually only when asked for it, but all the time – in a transaction as easy as breathing in and out – she gave understanding. Whenever Sandra was with her for a few hours, she could feel herself taking on the way Aunt Marion looked at things. For all her traditionally spinsterish ways, Aunt Marion was a woman whose type was that of a mother. She would know what to do about a runaway child. Never mind, Sandra thought. It’s all settled.

  When she was ready for bed, she no longer felt like reading. She left the book on the night table and turned out the light.

  She dreamt that she was standing on the outer stairs of a grand plantation mansion. The steps she stood on, the columns at either side, the building behind her, were all white, like the dress she was wearing. She could actually feel the dress, in which she stood as if captured: the skirt went out and down from the waist like the sides of a balloon and she was lashed into the center of its many lacy spheres. As the dream began, she’d been looking outward, evidently expecting someone to arrive, but there wasn’t anyone there.

  The next thing she knew, she was standing inside the house. She was still waiting, but now she had no view of the
outside, nor of the front entrance leading to it. Several men appeared suddenly, carrying something. Of course, she thought: Aunt Marion had told her to let the workmen in. She went forward into another room and met the gang of men. She started to give them directions about where to put the window; she now knew exactly where it was to be. As she pointed to a wall in front of her, there – as if it had been there all along, and not made up by her on the spur of the moment – was the empty space where the window was to fit.

  The men went to work. The window was in place. She was alone again. But once more she could see – looking through the newly installed window to the front of the house – the steps, the carriageway and the garden beyond. The window became a door. A man walked up the steps and rang the bell. She could see through: it was Eric’s father, Roy. He said, as before, ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’ She let him in.

  They went into a large room, also white. They stood there for a few minutes while he told her something about what had gone wrong in his son’s life. Then he put his hand on her breast. They made love. They talked about getting married. Aunt Marion came in with a wedding dress and veil. She was accompanied by deliverymen who carried flowers. The house changed into a church: the wedding was about to begin. But Roy wasn’t there. In his place stood his child, Eric. Aunt Marion was at her side; she seemed to think everything was normal. So did everybody else. And she, Sandra, was the bride – she was there to get married. She took Eric’s hand. She said, ‘I do.’ He said, ‘Sure, I guess so.’ Then they were going back down the aisle together. Everyone else was happy; some of them were even applauding. But she felt defrauded. She didn’t see why she hadn’t been able to get the one she’d wanted. ‘Where is he?’ she asked her aunt, who said, ‘He’s on a tropical island.’

  * * *

  The next morning was a sunny day. A light, springlike breeze fluttered across the neighborhood gardens and twirled back on itself, playing. She felt it on her face when she opened the front door to take in the newspaper.

  She made herself some real coffee and had a large, thick piece of toast with butter and honey. The bread was from a homebaked loaf – the kind of thing that was probably as fattening as cake. She put extra milk in her coffee. She didn’t turn on the radio or the television, or bother to open the paper. The only sounds to be heard were of her chewing and swallowing. It seemed as if the rest of the world had disappeared. She wondered suddenly why her aunt didn’t have a pet. Dogs could be too much trouble: you had to walk them and they pined if you left them. But a cat wouldn’t mind being left on its own, or being fed and patted by strangers. She thought that she might give her aunt a kitten. She’d have to find out first, whether it would be a good idea. There were many people, more than you’d think, who didn’t like pets, and who believed that life with a pet carried the same demands and responsibilities as life with another person.

  She went for a walk. She stepped out of the door and into a world that seemed to be abandoned by the human race. The birds were still there and a lone dog trotted purposefully, tail-up, in the distance. But no people came into view, not even children. Everyone must have listened to the weather report, considered it believable, and decided to drive away to other places: to see friends, to visit relatives, to search for the more beautifully leaved trees that must be somewhere, although no one had seen them that year: any place, different but the same.

  She started out in the direction of the pioneer statue. Her feet, her whole body felt light and unusually flexible. A wonderful day could really be better than people.

  The road she was walking along led her through a neighborhood where the houses were small, as were their front yards, but there was no indication of poverty. On the contrary, houses and gardens alike were well tended. Aunt Marion would have lived in such an area if she’d moved into a house forty years later than she had. When she’d married, these houses wouldn’t have been where they were. They came after the days of large families.

  Two turnings brought her down to the end of a long road that, as far as she could guess, curved back towards where she’d hoped – the day before – to find the statue. When she got to the point where she expected to see the beginnings of the road she remembered, there were three branches: one kept on, the other turned off down a hill and the third seemed to go back in the right direction, but uphill and at an angle that, if unchanged, might lead her eventually to the other side of town. She was lost again. She was also getting tired.

  Where had she made the mistake? Or had she taken more than one wrong turning? She stood still for a minute, thinking that there was no way of guessing which way the roads went, especially for someone with such a poor sense of direction.

  As she was looking ahead and to the right, she noticed smoke coming from somewhere. At least one person was at home and out in the gardens around her, burning leaves. The smell was faint, and gone away, back again and then lost. It might be coming from a long way off. At that moment a man appeared in the road that ran from the top of the hill. She turned around. She decided to retrace her steps. It wasn’t exactly that she felt nervous, but she didn’t know the neighborhood, nobody else was nearby, and the locality from which the stranger came was unknown; he was therefore to be avoided, whereas if she had seen a man raking leaves in a yard, she’d have gone up to him and asked how to get back to the street her aunt’s house was on. A man standing by his own house was fixed, identifiable and as safe as if he were wearing a nametag. Strangers could come from anywhere. She forgot that she too was a stranger.

  She was almost at the end of the row of houses and approaching to another fork in the road – hoping that she’d remember it – when she heard someone calling her name from behind her. She turned. The man from the top of the hill was coming up to her at a slow run. She didn’t recognize him until he called her name again and waved. It was Roy, Eric’s father, from the night before. He looked different. He was wearing a pullover and a pair of chinos. He might have been a student or even a teenager.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I waved at you from back there.’

  ‘I didn’t see,’ she said. ‘I was trying to figure out what road to take. I’m lost.’

  ‘This one goes back to your house.’

  ‘I wanted to get to the statue of the pioneer woman.’

  ‘Oh. Sure. Wilhelmina.’

  ‘Is that her name?’

  ‘No, that’s just what we call her.’

  We? Did that mean him and his son, or him and the wife he was divorced from? Or a new girl he was going out with?

  ‘It’s a long walk up the hill,’ he said, ‘or back to Trellis Road, and then you jog left.’

  ‘That’s where I went wrong.’

  ‘I’ll walk you back.’ He started to move forward, putting his hand on her arm for a moment as he did so. She fell into step beside him.

  ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ she said.

  ‘One of the few. It’s been a lousy year. Even now: I hear it’s still raining just about everyplace else.’

  ‘Well, I guess we need it, after the drought. The trees look so sad.’

  ‘Yes. Everything looks wrong.’

  They passed a yard where someone had been burning a pile of leaves. Whoever it was had gone back inside.

  ‘How’s Eric?’ she said.

  ‘He’s okay. Quiet. It follows a pattern. I guess you’ve seen him around here before. He’s been going off like this for – oh, a year and some. Usually he comes home of his own accord.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s hard to know what to do. I keep hoping he’ll grow out of it.’

  ‘Have you asked a doctor about it?’

  ‘He doesn’t need a doctor. He needs a mother.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he’s got one, hasn’t he?’

  ‘What he had was worse than having nothing.’

  ‘There’s something I ought to tell you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He threatened me with a knife.’

  ‘Oh, God. I
’ve always thought most of what he does is for show. And a lot of talk.’

  ‘I don’t know how serious it was. The knife was just an ordinary table knife. But it could have been a sharper one. He yelled at me not to phone you and he held it like this. Right? I couldn’t tell if he meant to do anything, because I don’t know him. But it’s a bad sign. Especially since – well, at the moment he’s too young to be dangerous. But what’s going to happen later? He’s smart and he doesn’t like people.’

  ‘He likes you.’

  ‘Oh? But I’m the one who betrayed him. I handed him over to you.’

  ‘I guess you made him realize that it was necessary.’

  They came to the point where the neighborhood changed. She saw that there was a road running around to the back of one of the houses; she hadn’t noticed it and, if she had, she’d have assumed it to be a private driveway. Now that she was seeing from another angle, she remembered that it was the road to the statue. ‘We’re here,’ she said. ‘This is it.’

  ‘Do you want to go see it?’

  She looked at her watch. ‘I’d like to,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know what time my aunt – she said she’d be back on Sunday afternoon. That could mean one minute past twelve.’

  ‘That’s a long way off.’

  ‘Yes. Okay, sure. I’d like to.’ They walked up the road she’d missed. He talked about the neighborhood: he’d moved there around the time when he was at college. He said, ‘So you live with your family? That’s nice. Hardly anyone does any more.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t, either. I live in town. I’m only keeping an eye on my aunt’s house while she’s away for the weekend.’

  ‘In that case, it was incredibly lucky that you were there.’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Oh yes – definitely. Ricky doesn’t respond to everyone. In fact, he’ll hardly speak to anyone. I think he sort of opened up to you. He keeps talking about you.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘How nice you are.’

  ‘Well. I was just thinking last night that my great-aunt would have handled the whole thing a lot better. I don’t know much about children.’